First of all, if you don’t follow dihard, you’re missing out on well-written, well-researched posts on a huge variety of cool topics on a regular basis.

Anyway, it’s always interesting (usually not for the better) to see how much power Wal-Mart can exert over suppliers.

One positive example: Remember how PC games used to come in those giant boxes that were mostly empty? Retailers had been begging game publishers to shrink the packaging for ages, but no publisher wanted to be the first or only one to do it, because then their games would be smaller on the shelf and would (presumably) sell fewer copies compared to the larger boxes from their rivals. But Wal-Mart issued an ultimatum a few years back (around 2002, maybe?) to all of the game publishers: drop your box size to this standard by this date, or we’ll stop selling your games. And the change happened practically overnight.